When He Was Young

In a career dotted with curious projects, Neil Young's "A Letter Home" (Reprise) stands out as particularly peculiar. It's an album of covers mostly from his young-adult years—the newest song is "My Hometown," released by Bruce Springsteen three decades ago. Mr. Young, 68, made the record in Nashville using Jack White's 1947 Voice-o-Graph, the kind of technology that could be found in mid-20th-century direct-to-disc booths in arcades, department stores and other public forums where anyone could cut a record for a nominal fee.

Mr. Young visited Mr. White's Third Man Records in April 2013 and liked what he'd heard coming from the Voice-o-Graph. "I love the way it sounded. It was real," he said during a phone interview last week. "It's like those Leadbelly or Robert Johnson records."

Machines like Mr. White's—which Mr. Young refers to as "the box"—were often used to send a scratchy audio recording to a loved one. "A Letter Home" begins with a spoken-word message to his mother; Mr. Young said she was on his mind as he improvised the introduction.

"The songs reminded me of her," he said, calling from a Manhattan hotel on Mother's Day. "This device used to be used by people who wanted to say something to someone who was far away." In his audio letter, Mr. Young tells his mother he loves and misses her, and advises her to "start talking to Daddy again." (Mr. Young's parents split up when he was 12.) As it unfolds, it's clear Mr. Young is dispatching his letter to the afterlife; his mother died in 1990. "I'll be there eventually," he adds, "though not for a while. I still have a lot of work to do here."

For the armchair psychologist, Mr. Young's nod toward longevity is a relief. Since his 2005 surgery for a brain aneurysm, he's given great emphasis to his personal history, publishing an autobiography; serving as the subject of three documentary films by Jonathan Demme; releasing a massive boxed set, "Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972)," and "Americana," a new collection of standards recorded with his band Crazy Horse; and touring separately with old band mates Crosby, Stills and Nash and the surviving members of Buffalo Springfield. "A Letter Home" works best as another of Mr. Young's journeys through the past.

The opening narration's conversational tone continues in the performances. The majority of the songs are from the late 1950s—Ivory Joe Hunter's "Since I Met You Baby" and the Everly Brothers' "I Wonder If I Care as Much"—and from the 1960s: compositions by Bob Dylan, Tim Hardin, Bert Jansch, Gordon Lightfoot and Phil Ochs, all of whom helped shape Mr. Young's approach to music. Listeners who brave their way through the recordings' occasionally overbearing snap, crackle and pop will find Mr. Young in a melancholy mood as he sings in sequence "Changes," Ochs's lament about shifting memories; Mr. Dylan's ballad of lost love, "Girl From the North Country"; and "Needle of Death," Jansch's tale of despair and drug abuse. His version of Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" gives the collection a lift; it features on piano Mr. White, who contributes the harmony vocal on the Everly Brothers cover. The deluxe "A Letter Home" package contains a DVD that shows a diligent Mr. Young at work, often with Mr. White looking over his shoulder, and includes his performances without the noise of the Voice-O-Graph's disc.

"Before the idea of using the box, I was thinking about the songs that influenced me and made a difference in my life," Mr. Young said. "I collected the songs, and over the period of three months practiced them so I knew them real well. You can't screw up in there: There's only one take." In fact, Mr. Young drops a chord here and there, but that's part of the album's idiosyncratic charm.

"This is an art project," he said of "A Letter Home." "It's about historic sound. This puts the music in an old context. It's from a lost time."

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal's rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com and follow him on Twitter @wsjrock.

Really looking forward to this. One of the very few R&R geezers that I still listen to. Doesn't give a hoot about trends and changing musical fashions gonna do what he wants and join the journey if you want to. An amazing body of work and always something new and different - long may it continue.

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